Hopkins made large claims about the originality of his efforts in the composition of music. This chapter expresses caution about the interest and significance of these efforts. It notes large gaps in Hopkins’s understanding of music and finds his surviving comments on the music he heard unenlightening. Even his poem on the composer Henry Purcell reveals little in this respect. Hopkins’s correspondence with the Irish musician Sir Robert Stewart required the musician to attempt to correct basic errors in Hopkins’s musical practice. Music can therefore be considered a meaningful context for Hopkins only in the limited sense that his interests here connect with his view of poetry as sound and as requiring performance.